The 2014 Myth

For some reason, smart people continue to repeat a misconception, and smart people continue to quote smart people repeating that misconception. The reason the health reform law's biggest pieces--the expansion of Medicaid and the launching of health insurance exchanges where people will be able to choose from a variety of private health insurance plans--don't go into effect until 2014, the misconception goes, is that a trick was played to make the numbers work out right. If only that trick hadn't been played, the law would already be fully in effect and in significantly less danger of being torpedoed after the next election.

The WashPo's usually great Sarak Kliff quotes the usually impressive Paul Starr:

Paul Starr makes a smart point in his recent Washington Post op-ed on the health reform law. The law’s unpopularity, he argues, has a lot to do with the fact that it had to be constrained to get a good score from the Congressional Budget Office:

Primarily to ensure that the Congressional Budget Office would “score” the legislation as reducing the deficit, Obama agreed to delay implementation of the major provisions of the law until January 2014, nearly four years after the bill passed. And contrary to his position during the 2008 campaign, the president also agreed to an individual mandate — again, partly to keep down the program’s cost — even though the mandate predictably became the law’s most unpopular provision and the focus of legal and political challenges.

These concessions have had opposite effects on the emotional commitments in the two parties. While opposition to the mandate has become a rallying point for Republicans, the long delay in implementing reforms has left many Democrats discouraged and uncertain about the law’s benefits. The four-year timetable also undercuts any possible political gain from the reforms; the president will have little to show by the 2012 election and little chance of clearing up the confusion and anxieties about the law.

The reality is that those big pieces of the reform law are tough. They're being built state-by-state and are subject to myriad local political hurdles, not least because the Republicans did especially well at the state level in the 2010 elections. But even putting aside the political constraints, the technical and policy feats needed to make this work are substantial. Even in those states that want to make this work and are moving full steam ahead to implement the law, the challenges are very real and the dangers of missing the 2014 deadline loom.

That's part of the reason the federal government is bending over backwards to be as collaborative and flexible as possible. For example, the law provides that states that don't set up their own health insurance exchanges get one set up and operated by the federal government. But through the rulemaking process, the folks at the Department of Health and Human Services are proposing a few more shades of gray--varying degrees of federal control to help states stand up their own exchanges by leaning on federal support for certain key features. States can then conceivably retain autonomy over their exchanges, yet not shoulder the technical and operational burdens of making an exchange work all by themselves.

The point here is that the suggestion that health reform could already be implemented under some scenario is simply wishful thinking. This is hard, uncharted territory: minus pieces of the Massachusetts experiment, no one has ever done anything like this. That's why it's going to work. But states were always going to need time to make it happen.

And guns. Lots of guns.

Conspiracy!

As Stanek and Andrew are probably well aware of by now, I work in an office with some pretty hardcore Republicans - every day they listen to Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh on the radio, complain about the liberals and certain minorities in the city, etc. etc. Usually I just tune it out and concentrate on my work (I have a handy pair of headphones and an iPhone with a lot of Beatles music on it which has been instrumental in preventing migraines), and they have always been more than pleasant towards me personally so I can't really complain. But a few days ago they mentioned something to me that struck me as overwhelmingly ridiculous. According to them, the conservative radio shows that they listen to have been stressing that businesses are ready to hire again and are sitting on "piles of money", however they want to see how the next presidential election turns out because they're scared that President Obama might win again.

This helped put into words a suspicion I've always had about the Republican party. Maybe my theory is nothing new (Stanek can probably answer that better than I can and I find it hard to believe that nobody has connected the dots here), but considering that business owners and corporate executives are almost exclusively Republican, aren't they essentially holding the economy hostage to support their preferred political party? If what these conservative radio shows are arguing is true, and I don't know if it is or even that they actually said it (and I'm sure as hell not going to re-listen to their shows to find out), then the economy is supposedly getting better but business owners are holding it back because Obama is president. This creates a pretty interesting self-fulfilling prophecy among conservatives who think Democrats are bad for the economy. How can economic strength ever be used to gauge the effectiveness of a Democratic president when businesses are willing to cripple the economy until a Republican is elected? And I know what conservatives would say in response: "Democrats are innately bad for business so employers are just protecting themselves." But all that does is bypass the issue and fuel the self-fulfilling prophecy to carry on.

Again, I have no idea how true this is or if Rush or Glenn Beck even made this argument. However, it still makes me wonder about businesses manipulating the economy for political reasons in general. And as I said before I don't expect this to be all that revolutionary of an idea, but I am interested in what you guys think or know. At least it makes me more confident that President Obama is doing a better job than people seem to think.

P.S. - This is the 200th post at the Speakeasy! Grab a beer and celebrate.

The Path to Power, Perry-style

Celebrated ideas man Rick Perry attempted to bounce back from his "oops" moment this week with the release of a bold--non-999--plan. From the man who brought you the optional flat tax comes the plan to "Uproot and Overhaul Washington." What caught my eye were his suggestions for "fundamental reform of the legislative branch." Specifically two items:

Part-Time Citizen Congress:

[...]

The U.S. does not need a full-time Congress that is more focused on increasing its perks instead of reducing spending. America needs a part-time, Citizen Congress – populated with those who choose to serve not for profit, or for the promise of a high-paying lobbyist job, but for the good of their communities, states, and the nation. Even with a 50 percent pay-cut, Congressional members would still make a significantly higher income than the average American.11 [...]

Slash Spending for Congressional Staff:
According to the Congressional Research Service, Congress employed more than 15,000 staffers as of 2009.13 In the Senate, the number of staff assigned to senators’ personal offices has more than doubled since 1977; the number of so-called “leadership staff” more than quadrupled over the same time period.14 As the number of staffers grows, so does congressional involvement in nearly every aspect of the American economy.

Why those two in particular? Because they strike me as being an enormous executive power grab.

I can't claim to be well-versed in Texas politics but the word on the street seems to be that Perry inherited a relatively weak office from his illustrious predecessor and found ways to strengthen it, centralizing power through heretofore untapped channels:

For most of history, Texas has been considered a “weak governor” state. That changed under Perry’s leadership. His lengthy tenure as governor has allowed him to appoint political allies in every single state agency, effectively establishing a Cabinet-style government and giving him vastly more power than any of his predecessors.

And now it seems the governor is setting his sights on accomplishing a similar feat in Washington, D.C.; disconcerting perhaps when you realize we already have a pretty strong federal executive. Aside from the obvious ramifications for executive power of slashing Congressional pay and sending Congress home, the gutting of their staffs is particularly significant. To see why, we need only look back at the overhaul of the modern bureaucratic state that occurred in the first half of the last century, particularly under FDR. With the balance of bureaucratic expertise (and raw numbers of staff) tipping heavily in the White House's favor, Congress found itself at a distinct disadvantage.

"Congressional procedure," Life magazine was to note in 1945, is largely "the same as it was in 1789." As for the Senate's basic committee and staff structure, that had been established in 1890. During the intervening decades, government had grown enormously--in 1946 the national budget was three hundred times the size it had been in 1890--but the staffs of the Senate committees had grown hardly at all. To oversee that budget, the Senate Appropriations Committee staff consisted of eight persons, exactly one more than had been on that staff decades earlier. Not only were they ridiculously small, the staffs of Senate committees had little of the technical expertise necessary to understand a government which had become infinitely more complicated and technical. The salaries of congressional staff members were so low that Capitol Hill could not attract men and women of the caliber that were flocking to the executive branch.

A study done in 1942 concluded that only four of the seventy-six congressional committees had "expert staffs prepared professionally even to cross-examine experts of the executive branch." As for senators' personal staff, as late as 1941, a senator would be entitled to hire only six employees, and only one at a salary--$3,000--which might attract someone with qualifications above those of a clerk. So little importance was attached to staff that many senators didn't hire even the six to which they were entitled, and an astonishingly high proportion of the approximately 500 employees on senators' personal staffs and the 144 on the staff of the Senate committees were senators' relatives. The Founding Fathers envisioned Congress as a check on the executive. Congress couldn't make even a pretense of analyzing the measures the executive submitted for its approval.

During the decades since 1890, when the Senate had authorized a staff of three persons for its Foreign Relations Committee, the United States had become a global power, with interests in a hundred foreign countries. In 1939, the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was still three: one full-time clerk who took dictation, typed and ran the stenotype machine, and two part-time clerks. As one observer put it, "There could be no adversary relationship between the two branches of government [in foreign relations] because most of the professional work had to be done in the Department of State." Anyone seeking an explanation of the Senate's willingness to allow the rise of the executive agreement, which freed it from the details of foreign policy, need look no further: the Senate simply had no staff adequate to handle the details of foreign policy. The adversary relationship--the relationship that had lain at the heart of the Framers' concept of the American government they thought they were creating--had become impossible in virtually all areas; even Senate Parliamentarian Floyd Riddick had to admit that "with occasional exceptions, Congress did little more than look into, slightly amend or block bills upon which it was called to act."

Unable to analyze legislation, Congress was equally unable to create it.

This was perhaps the most significant alteration in the power of the House and the Senate. The Framers of the Constitution had given Congress great power to make laws, vesting in it "all legislative powers," and during the early, simpler days of the Republic, Congress had jealously guarded that power; as late as 1908, the Senate had erupted in anger when the Secretary of the Interior presumed to send it a bill already drafted in final form. But by the 1930s, with government so much more complicated, bill-drafting had become a science. Knowledge of that science was in extremely short supply on Capitol Hill. There were plenty of legislative technicians with the necessary expertise at the great law firms in New York. There were plenty at the White House, and in the executive departments--the legislative section of the Agriculture Department alone had six hundred employees. In 1939, the Legislative Drafting Service that helped both houses of Congress consisted of eight employees. And of all the scores of major statutes passed during the New Deal, approximately two per year were created by Congress--because, as Tommy Corcoran explained, Congress simply lacked the "technical equipment to draft a big, modern statute."

--Master of the Senate, Robert Caro

Does Perry really want to revert to a time when the legislative branch was so emasculated it didn't have the expertise to even ask executive branch officials to explain themselves?

He seems so stupid but, if only by accident, there's something Johnsonian about him. Stupid like a fox!


P.S. If you haven't read any of Caro's multi-part series (including Master of the Senate) chronicling the rise of Lyndon Johnson, do it. Just do it.



(The Passage of Power is coming in May. I'm going to fucking hyperventilate.)

Pendulum Swings

So far it seems to be a night in which overreaches on the part of overzealous newly-elected Republicans have been repudiated. Issue 2 in Ohio, the anti-union legislation, has gone down in flames. Same day voter registration here in Maine was restored by the people tonight, after the Republican legislature and Governor eliminated it. Even in ruby-red Mississippi a movement to define personhood as beginning at conception seems to have been handily defeated.

One more example to make the point. Way back in January I posted Dis-integration about the demise of Wake County North Carolina's successful effort to integrate schools along socio-economic lines. Flashback:

IN RALEIGH, N.C. The sprawling Wake County School District has long been a rarity. Some of its best, most diverse schools are in the poorest sections of this capital city. And its suburban schools, rather than being exclusive enclaves, include children whose parents cannot afford a house in the neighborhood.

But over the past year, a new majority-Republican school board backed by national tea party conservatives has set the district on a strikingly different course. Pledging to "say no to the social engineers!" it has abolished the policy behind one of the nation's most celebrated integration efforts.

Remember?

And tonight: Democrats complete sweep of Wake school seats

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — A Democratic-aligned candidate retained his seat on the Wake County school board Tuesday, completing a sweep of the seats up for grabs this year.

Incumbent Kevin Hill beat challenger Heather Losurdo by nearly 1,000 votes Tuesday. The result means Democrats will have a 5-4 majority on the board governing North Carolina's largest school district.

It could also mean a change in direction for the board that decided last year to scrap a decade-old busing plan aimed at making sure schools didn't become too heavily identified as either poor or rich.

So it looks like working people, women, kids, and everyone entitled to political franchise are the big winners tonight. Smile, Teej.

Back swings the pendulum. Here's hoping that it gains momentum over the next 12 months.